The Lecture Room was renamed the Barnard Room in 2023, after the late Professor Alan Barnard FBA, who was an anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Barnard received his Fellowship in this very room and his family wanted to remember him with a very generous donation in his memory.
During the First World War, No. 10 became a hospital for wounded officers. This room – then the Ballroom – was one of the first to become a ward when the house was converted.
The Red Cross roll of hospitals for January 1915 records Lady Ridley’s hospital as having 25 occupied beds. As the war progressed, Lady Ridley made more room available by moving out a lot of furniture and pictures. By 1917, further rooms on the ground floor and first floor had been converted into wards, and huts had been built on the terrace to cater for soldiers suffering from poison gas, taking the total of beds to 60. There was also an operating theatre on the ground floor. There is a false fireplace at the back of the room. In its place used to be a door connecting the room with the now Council Room. Similarly, the staircase between the former Lecture Room and the forthcoming Radhakrishnan Room was installed during refurbishment carried out by the British Academy. The space between the two rooms would have originally been an antechamber.
Trompe l’oeil ceiling, c. 1910 by Bremond and Tastemain
This ornate yet unfinished ceiling was commissioned by the Ridley family in the style of Eugène Delacroix, leader of the French Romantic school. It is unclear why the ceiling remained unfinished.